food, to my family and i, has always been a serious business. it's in our (italian and polish) blood. it not only makes up our holiday traditions (my sister and i once decided that we knew we were old when, during the after-church christmas eve celebrations at our grandparents' house, we were no longer as excited about the gifts as about the food we knew would come afterword and throughout) but really, is the main topic of daily conversation. this is only amplified when we go on vacation. our event planning on vacation does not really revolve around being good tourists, but being good eaters. on finishing lunch, we say, "god. that was good. i'm gonna puke in 2.4 seconds. where we gonna eat dinner?" in warm hearted discussions of old vacations, memories again revolve around food. "remember that time when we visited sara in DC and ate at the barbecue restaurant with nine different types of barbecue on the table?" my only crisp recollection of the first time i visited new orleans was the largest piece of strawberry cheesecake i had ever seen in my life, which my brother somehow miraculously consumed to the last crust crumb. my sister always knew the best places to go on visits to DC or new orleans. she had the selections lined up before we even arrived and we always left satisfied. part of the reason i was so pleased to be in san francisco with the people i was with was that i knew she and my family would be proud. kathy and i were accompanied for the majority of the week by erin, who had recently spent a year in the city, and her friend rae, who still lives there. in addition to simply and purely loving her adopted hometown and knowing every kind of trivia about it, rae also knows her food. i thank her and erin endlessly for an immensely satisfyingly unhealthy week. the pretty blue table at the mexican restaurant kathy and i ate at on our first night in the city inspired me to take out my digital camera - not that it takes much to inspire me to take out my digital camera - and a day or two later i decided to continue the trend and document my favorite meals. this may sound silly, but it was really pretty fun and a method of capturing memory that makes a remarkable amount of sense to me.